That is correct. Newly arrived Chinese immigrants in HK often report that even the newspapers are difficult to understand, and those are not even in full written Cantonese. They would be completely lost in an Internet message board, where almost everything is written in colloquial Cantonese.
I’ve lived in the SF area my whole life, including the city and know many Cantonese speakers. Nobody in my presence has ever complained about Chinatown. That’s really what it is. Several square block area of Chinese immigrants and descendents with fake architectural details and packed with Chinese shops and culture. Be aware that the term “Chinaman” and its variations are offensive.
San Francisco has a Japantown too, but it is entirely modern buildings in the Fillmore where before WWII the Japanese immigrants liked to live. They were moved out to internment camps in WWII and had to sell very quick.
Speaking of Cantonese and not being able to communicate with ones mother.
Years ago I lived in Hong Kong. I met an Australian women who had come to Hong Kong about a year before. The “great job” that was promised her didn’t work out and she ended up having to work many hours in a bar to make ends meet.
The problem was that she had arrived with her two sons, 5 and 6 years old. She only had money enough to live in a rather run down flat and certainly didn’t have the money to enroll the kids in a school for foreign English speaking children. The boys attended the local elementary school where only Cantonese was spoken.
The boys quickly picked up the language and soon even began to speak to each other in Cantonese! Because the mother spent so much time working, the neighbors “adopted” the boys and allowed them to spend hours at their homes.
The mother would only spend time with them on Sundays and she often complained to me how poor their English had become, even to the point where she had trouble communicating with them.
Riding on the bus with the boys was really a laugh. Both of them were blue eyed blonds and to see absolutely flawless Cantonese come out of their mouths while talking to each other was a sight to see (and hear). The bus driver and other locals on the bus could not believe their ears.
I sure hope the boys stayed in Hong Kong and didn’t neglect their English for too long. A foreigner who could speak both English and Cantonese fluently like they could certainly would be able to find a good job in Hong Kong. At least I would think so.
Or almost anywhere in the world! Those kinds of kids are the kids of the future, for sure.
It’s really unlikely that your ex did not understand what her mother was saying. But being able to understand your Mom does not mean you can speak or speak with any kind of fluency. And depending on your ex and the time she grew up, it may not have been “cool” to speak or pretend to speak anything other than English. Her parents may have also encouraged her not to speak their native dialect so she would grow up to be a successful lawyer or doctor.
Some of all that I think. It seems inconceivable to me, having known many more immigrant families since then, that she not know some Chinese. To me any would have been cool indeed, she was my girlfriend! This was ~1981 or so. Why she hid it instead of just explaining about her family (which was very different from my suburban NJ upbringing) is a weird mystery. I am not aware of any other secrets, it is not like this was a 2 week or even 2 month thing…
Minor correction: most adult Norwegians can read Swedish relatively easily. This isn’t quite as true the other way around, but it’s simply because Sweden has twice the population of Norway. Norwegians quite simply have more exposure to Swedish than Swedes have to Norwegian.
In both Scandinavia and China, the old joke about a language being a dialect with an army has some real-world relevance. You could argue that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are all dialects of the same language - but wars have started over less.
The original “Chinatown” inhabitnats tended to be coolies imported from the Hong Kong area to work on the railroads across Canada and the USA. Hence, Cantonese. This was reinforced in the 1960’s and 1970’s, as richer Hong Kong residents saw the cultural revolution and its aftermath. Especially in Canada, Britain, and Australia, these residents as British subjects had a bit of an edge in getting in. The English exposure they already ahd didn’t hurt either.
Hong Kong was on a 150-year lease to Britain and was due back to China in 1997. Many families shipped their kids overseas for a good education, and due to much more lax immigration laws then, this gave them a head start in getting foreign or dual citizenship - a safety net for 1997.
One third of the graduating class in my private school was Hong Kong students who came over for that last year of high school, since it simplified entry into university. As citizens, then then brought the rest of their families over.
Once things began to loosen up in the 1980’s, people who wanted to emigrate sometimes could (unlike the iron curtain countries). China also began to sent students abroad for education, to pick up what they had fallen behind on in the earlier decades. This was a large mix of people, but generally, the language was more likely to be Mandarin than Cantonese.
The illegal immigrants coming to the USA and elsewhere nowadays come from all sorts of poorer areas of CHina, which explains the variety of dialects.
There was an interesting article about language in The Economist several years ago. The Chinese government likes to push the view that they are one harmonious whole; they want to hide the fact that they are actually, like Europe, a large collection of diverse ethnic groups that were assimilated (in various ways) over the millenia of empire, much like latin and the Romans. Hence the diversity of languages, and of dialects.
Some more obscure groups have pretty much disappeared liguistically, but their pronunciation shows their origins. There are groups where their original grammar is overlaid on Mandarin words. (Much like Yiddish to English - “That I should be wanting?”). But for the harmony of the center, and to prevent the threat of separatist movements, these differences are not allowed to be discussed. The Chinese government is well aware that in times of troubles, the edges tended to separate off from the center.
Mind you, the modern ethnic minorities are treated better; but as the Tibetans and Uiguirs(?) among others complain, there does seem to be a tendency to push central Chinese settlers into their area to dilute their numbers.
If you ask me Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are three dialect groups within the Scandinavian language (an opinion I adopted from a Norwegian friend).
As for Norwegians understanding Swedish better than we understand Norwegian I’m ashamed to say that I think it’s mostly a matter of uninterest coupled with laziness.
On the other hand I was once taught that if someone comes to the library and asks for literature on a specific subject and the only book you have is in Danish just hand it over with a little white lie that it’s Norwegian (Swedes are notorious for thinking that Danish is so incomprehensible that it’s not worth even the slightest effort to learn to understand it). It should work as long as it’s written in Bokmål.
Not just that. They’re all from one country whose government actively promotes the idea that they’re all dialects of one language. That idea is compatible with the idea that China is one unified country, and that’s a concept that the Chinese government very much wants to promote.
One of my friends from Vancouver has parents who came from China. She does not speak Chinese at all. There were seven children in her family, and she is the youngest. I think the older children served as translators in her case.
Somewhat similar but affectionate: http://mymomisafob.com/
I think most modern linguists don’t really view “dialect” as a technical term–they’re all considered “languages”. Politics is different and politicians have agendas, in China it is to emphasize homogeneity. In the Balkans it is the opposite. Lastly, as mentioned above, there was a Euro-centric convention awhile back to dismiss most non-European languages as “dialects”
Spoke no Chinese, or understood no?
I’ve met more than one person who didn’t speak their parent’s language, but could understand it perfectly. I used to think that was very weird until I realized that I was much better at understanding French than actually speaking it.
If the parents can understand (but not speak) English, and the kids can understand (but not speak) Chinese, then they can at least communicate.
Yeah, I see that in parts of my present gf’s family (not Chinese, but still, they all immigrated here in my lifetime, at various ages).
But in the case of the Chinese, the claim was no understanding either.
I just have always carried with me how said it must be for a mother not to be able to communicate with a child, yet to be fully present in each other’s lives. I have a hard time grasping how that can happen.
Bangkok’s Chinatown is large and heavily promoted in the tourist literature. No one objects to the term. This is the first inkling I’ve ever had that anyone could possibly take offense at it.
There’s a Thai Town somewhere near Los Angeles. I believe that’s the actual name of the community. Established by Thai immigrants.
Yes, I think that is true too. When I wrote the guidebook on China in the 1980’s, all my research had Tibetan as part of the Tibeto-Burman language family. These days, many (most?) linguists are touting Tibetan as part of the Sinetic (Chinese) language family. It may be true, but it is certainly *convenient *for Beijing.
Maybe *I *have it completely screwed up, but I thought there was a chinatown in the state of California long before there was a state of Hawaii.
Hawaii didn’t just pop into existence in 1959 when it became a state. It was Hawaii for quite a long time before that, and the Chinatown in Honolulu predates any in California.
So that would presumably be before 1848 since there were certainly Chinese in CA at or soon after the gold rush.
I honestly don’t know - how did the Hawaiians and the Chinese get along? Why were the Chinese there if not en route to the Americas? Was there significant trade between China and Hawaii, enough to support a Chinatown? Were there corresponding Hawaiians in China for that matter?